Academy of Creative and Performing Arts

About this portalThe portal is used for the presentation of dissertations, papers, essays, artistic work, and work-in-progress of the ACPA PhD candidates. Furthermore, it is used by supervisors and other coaches to insert comments on the work of these candidates.

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[1] Central in my thinking on improvisation are two concepts: complexity and singularity.
[2] Improvisation is, in my opinion, a complex event in which many actants (the term is coined by Bruno Latour), many actors, factors, and vectors, both human and non-human, converge and interact. It is this interaction which will take center stage in my research. Examining improvisation as a complex system shifts the focus from an overriding concern with isolated actants to changing relationships between these actants. Besides human-human interactions, improvisation also implies interactions with or between audience, instruments, the performance space, technology, acoustics, aesthetic and cultural backgrounds, etc. Taking into account all these levels of musical, social, historical, acoustical, and technological engagement gives a more complete picture of the practice of improvisation.
[3] Although it is my point of departure that improvisation takes place in all musicking, not all of the actants mentioned above determine every improvisation to the same extent; in certain situations (periods, styles, cultures as well as more singular circumstances), some are more prominent and active than others. Therefore, I don’t want to deal with improvisation “in general”. Instead I emphasize singularity: each improvisation will yield a different network of actants and interactions. In other words, I would like to present a radical empiricism, a focus on particular and individual cases.